Pirate Series: Spanish raiders infest Virginia waters

Spanish privateers fled their country's Cross of Burgundy flag into the Chesapeake Bay.

Spanish privateers fled their country's Cross of Burgundy flag into the Chesapeake Bay.

Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

Glance through American newspapers from 1720 to 1748 and one change becomes abundantly clear.

The scourge of English pirates that had darkened shipping reports since the century began was replaced almost overnight by a new menace — this time an infestation of Spanish privateers swarming up from St. Augustine and Havana.

No place attracted the Don Benitos and Don Pedros of this predatory fleet more than the waters off the Virginia Capes and the Chesapeake Bay.

Countless times they slipped into Hampton Roads to hunt for unwary targets, taking ship after ship from such seemingly safe harbors as Old Point Comfort near the mouth of the Hampton River.

"Whenever Spain went to war with England — which was often — it went to war with Virginia," Colonial Williamsburg historian Carson Hudson says.

"That's when these privateers would sail up the Gulf Stream to the Capes and into Hampton Roads."

Virginia Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood was still celebrating his 1718 triumph over the notorious Blackbeard — and the recent hanging of six members of Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts' crew — when the first sign of the new Spanish plague appeared off the Capes on April 28, 1720.

Within days, this privateer sloop of 4 guns and 70 men was followed by more sea rovers from St. Augustine, including one so bold it chased its prey into Hampton Roads and made the panicked ships of the colony's merchant fleet scatter.

"Almost overnight word of Spanish privateering attacks up and down the Atlantic seaboard began to filter into the seaports," says maritime historian Donald G. Shomette, author of "Pirates on the Chesapeake."

"The Chesapeake was especially vulnerable because you could ride the Gulf Stream all the way from St. Augustine to Cape Hatteras. It took just a week-and-a-half to get here."

Some of the damage the Spanish inflicted can be seen in a July 1720 report describing the plight of 70 English seamen who were captured and put ashore on the York River.

Other victims were far less fortunate, including 18 whose remains washed up on the Eastern Shore.

"Some of them (were) tied back to back," the American Weekly Mercury of Philadelphia reported.

"One a Gentleman…was found with his hands tied behind him, and his two great toes tied together."

Adding to this terror was the fact that the latest war with Spain had ended.

Its sea-borne campaign of plunder and fear didn't stop, however, until a well-armed Virginia sloop manned by 60 Royal Navy seaman sailed under a white flag to St. Augustine, where it confronted the governor with a royal proclamation confirming the halt of hostilities — then demanded restitution.

Despite the subsequent pause in attacks, Spotswood wrote angrily to the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Foreign Plantations, complaining about the Royal Navy vessel that was too old and leaky to protect the colony's shipping.

He also insisted that Virginia's merchantmen would never be safe as long as the Spanish ruled St. Augustine.

"When they did send Royal Navy vessels to defend the Bay, they were almost invariably old and ready to sink when they got here," Shomette says.

"So the Spanish had a pretty open season. There was nothing to stop them."

A second wave of attacks took place in 1724 — when Spanish privateer Don Benito sailed to the Chesapeake aboard a "Guardia de la Costa" vessel outfitted, armed and commissioned by the governor of Cuba.

Soon after making the Capes, he chased down the Hampton merchantman "John and Mary," yelling "God damn you, strike, you English doggs, strike!" as the hapless crew scurried to heave to and haul down their colors.

Then he stripped it of 76 slaves, a cache of gold dust, various weapons and about 400 gallons of rum before seizing two more ships and sailing away unmolested.

Two decades of peace passed before the Spanish carried out their third and worst series of raids with not even a leaky old guardship to oppose them.

They seized dozens and dozens of vessels between 1741 and '45, when Spanish privateer Don Pedro arrived with a 36-gun ship and five-vessel fleet that left the entire East Coast gasping.

So pestilent was the threat that insurance rates for outbound vessels rose from a peacetime norm of 3 or 4 percent to nearly 25 percent, Shomette says. By that fall, London brokers were refusing to insure any ships headed for the Chesapeake — and those in Bristol were demanding premiums equal to nearly half the value of the cargoes.

Not until two 44-gun guardships began patrolling the Virginia Station in 1748 did the predators who had roved past Old Point Comfort finally begin to back off.

By summer's end, the determined commanders had taken so many Spanish privateers that they sent a small fleet of captured ships back to Havana in exchange for English prisoners of war.

"It's remarkable how long it took London to commit Royal Navy ships that were actually capable of defending the Virginia Capes and the Chesapeake Bay," says Mark G. Hanna, a University of California-San Diego historian who studied colonial piracy at the College of William and Mary's Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

"But when you have an empire to build and so many powerful enemies to contend with, the idea of taking a man of war away from your fleet and sending it to Virginia probably ranks no higher than number 50 on your to-do list."